No blog post last week
Sometimes the week starts to pass and you haven't written the blog post and before you know it you say okay I'm focusing on making an update rather than write a blog post. That's what happened. But this week it's Monday I have a game plan for the week so I'm here writing the blog post. All rejoice!

Last week's update
The week before I had set out to make the second level for Cosmoids and due to server issues I wasn't able to do that. So I took last week to focus most of my time on making the level. I'm really happy with the results and would love to hear what you guys and gals think so far of Cosmoids. I'm also considering bringing it out to the public so that you can play it even if you haven't contributed to the fundraiser (as easy as that is) so that more people can have access to it and I can get more feedback. What do you guys think of that?

On top of the second level for Cosmoids, I also added Meinfoo and Timburr into the game and they will be distributed as giveaways and mystery gifts for this week.

I also made a lot of adjustments to the server code to speed things up and I'm pretty happy with the results so far. Some people tend to mention that the "new" server is not good. The thing is we never switched servers or got a new server. We are still in the same one, I've been making changes to the way things work to speed things up.

This week's updateNew Story Level
This week my focus is to advance the story in PTD2. I'm really excited about this next part and hopefully I will have enough time to make it as good as it can be.

Shadow Moves
I will be adding some shadow moves from Pokemon XD: Gale of Darkness that your shadow pokemon will be able to relearn. Right now I'm not sure how many, who will learn what, and what type of effectiveness the moves will have against other types but I will keep you posted throughout the week.

Mystery Gift and Giveaway
Like most weeks, there will be a Mystery Gift and Giveaway. I've been pondering about giving out both shiny and shadow versions of each on different days as something that I could do. Either way vote on the polls to decide what you will get next.

PTD1 to PTD2 Transfers - Legendary Pokemon Arrive!
A much requested transfer is that of legendary pokemon from PTD 1 to PTD2 and it is finally time! I will be adding Articune, Zapdos, Moltres, Mewtwo and Mew to the transfer list this week!

Adopt Now for Trades
A feature I been wanting to try out for a while is for you guys to be able to put your pokemon up for adoption. Pretty much the way I'm seeing it now is that you can set an SnD coin price to your trade. A player that has SnD coins can either request a trade or straight up adopt your pokemon by paying your SnD price. You receive the coins and the other player receives the pokemon. With everything else that I have for this week I'm not sure if this will make it in time. Also you might be wondering why I don't use daily coins with this. The reason for that is the only way daily coins can exist is if they are hard to get or you can only get them at a certain rate per day. Allowing players to transfer daily coins from one account to another will open all sorts of exploits that I wish to avoid. I think this can be a great feature, what do you think?

Cosmoids
I try to move Cosmoids forward every week. I feel the more I work on it the more I want to keep working on it. I had a lot of fun just focusing on the second level. There are a few things that still need to be tweaked but I'm very excited for the future of the game. As the game becomes more developed over time, we will be talking about it more and more. For now you can play it at the funding rewards page in the PTD2 Trading Center. For this week we are tweaking the character graphic, making changes to level 1 to make it more compact and to the point, I will be figuring out ways to make the tutorial parts more understandable and easier to follow, and start work on level 3.

Last Week's Update/Server Issues
We had a crazy week last week, both in a good and bad way. Let's start with the bad. So instead of telling you the story how it unfolded I will just tell you what the problem was and how it caused all the issues that we had. Okay. So Databases need indexes. Imagine you have a giant book and it has no index. How would you find that page you are looking for without having to go through the whole book? You can't! So I had a tiny database (the one that keeps track of what events you had done in the story) that was missing an index. Initially the database was so small that it didn't matter. But as the game grew in size and in users this database grew. It has over 2 million entries and so every day as the database grew so did the slowdown. It got so slow that our host suspended our account. I told them to put it back up so I could disable all logins while I fixed the problem. I was really conflicted about all this. I'm no expert on databases or server administration so I had very little idea on where to start. Luckily I had bought this book called High Performance MySQL: Optimization, Backups, and Replication. While I didn't have the time to read the whole book or follow everything it had to say, it did give me some ideas on trying to find the problem and how to fix it. After doing some test to see how long each thing took to load I found that loading events was taking way too long even when I was the only user playing the game, which brought the discovery of the missing index on that database. Other than that I made some upgrades to the database engines (I changed from mysam to innodb, for those with database knowledge) that should let more people in at a time. There might be some side effects to these changes that I will have to fix but I'm pretty happy that we are somewhat back to working order.

The good stuff is the new content that I was able to bring to the game. I finally put in running shoes into the game which let you move at twice the speed. (Your pokemon will also move fast, I did have a version where your pokemon wasn't as fast and he would be left behind) You can get the shoes by talking to an old man in Cherrygrove City after you defeat Zapdos there. Another big and daunting task that I had was to add fishing. I actually go the chance to stream while I was making the fishing part and frankly I had no idea how I was going to add fishing. Luckily I'm pretty quick at thinking about how to solve problems and so I thought of a way to add it in and it worked out pretty well. You can now get an old rod or good rod by defeating the fisher man on the second part of Route 32 (Read the FAQ page for more detailed info). Once you have a rod you can go to any water source available in the game and fish on it (press spacebar or z) this will trigger a battle. Things like which rod you are using, which location you are in, time of day will affect who you get to battle with. I basically set it up to mimic the actual game. I'm really happy with how it turned out so I hope you guys can enjoy it.

On top of all of this I added all the generation 1 pokemon that you can capture in PTD2 to the PTD1 to PTD2 transfers. This includes: Jigglypuff, Wigglypuff, Zubat, Golbat, Bellsprout, Weepinbell, Victreebell, Geodude, Graveler, Golem, Gastly, Haunter, Gengar, Poliwag, Poliwrath, Krabby, Kingler, Staryu and Starmie. As I do every week there was also a Mystery Gift and a Giveaway pokemon. The Mystery Gift was electric ghost type Rotom and the giveaway was Plusle and Minun. If you got the code in time you would get 2 of each Plusle and Minun. One male and one female.

Last but not least Cosmoids had a nice update. I added more losing conditions, if you let enough bug creatures pass you will lose the level. You can tell how many lives you have left by the heart graphic on the top left. Evan, one of our freelance artist, also did a revision on the grass graphic for the first level. While I thought the original ones looked fine, Dan thought they needed more work. And so Evan did the job and they look great! The other thing I added was a fainting animation to the units. Instead of disappearing you will now see them flip on their backs and then flash before they disappear. These types of details go a long way in making a game. Each of them bringing us closer to a full game.

What's happening this week:Pokemon Center Bugs
I need detailed information about the Pokemon Center Bugs with Breeding, Trading and Picking up pokemon. The more step by step information you can give me the better.Mystery Gift
Like every week we will have a mystery gift and a giveaway for the runner up of the poll. You have one day to vote for which of the remaining types should be the new mystery gift. Then I will post specific pokemon that can be the mystery gift and giveaway.

PTD1 to PTD2 Transfers
My goal this week is to add a lot of Generation 1 Pokemon into PTD2. So this week I plan to add: Vulpix, Ninetails, Oddish, Gloom, Vileplume, Paras, Parasect, Venonat, Venomoth, Diglett, Dugtrio, Meowth, Persian, Psyduck, Golduck, Mankey, Primeape, Growlithe, Arcanine, Abra, Kadabra, Alakazam, Machop, Machoke, and Machamp. Adding these will make it so that you can get more than half of the Generation 1 Pokemon into PTD2!

Sun Stone
Since we are adding the Oddish family and Bellossom is part of Generation 2 then I'm also adding the Sun Stone so that Gloom can evolve into Bellossom!

Cosmoids Level Select Screen and Level 2
For Cosmoids this week I want to start work on Level 2. I really want each level to feel different than the others so each level will take some time to create. On level 2 is when you finally get your first creature, but please note that you won't be able to save just yet. Since we will have multiple levels we also need a level select screen. Very similar to PTD1 there will be different chapters. I'm looking forward to making this!

Last Week's Update
We had a huge update last week.We added over 20 new pokemon between the PTD1 to PTD2 transfers, the mystery gift, giveaway and the new fisherman level. On top of that we had a special easter hunt that will last all this week to get a Shiny Buneary. This also meant a lot of new moves that your other pokemon can also learn. We also had an unfortunate Bidoof epidemic that lasted a whole day! Those fools! There was also three new battles added with the happy fisherman. I added a new thing that will change the battle you will face with the fisherman depending on the day of the week. Shiny Heatran was added as an additional prize that you can now redeem for donating 10 or more for our fundraiser. Last but not least I managed to sneak in some Cosmoids time and added the grass graphics, the bug bite graphic, the win/lose screens, some tweaks on speed, hp and sizes for the enemy units. On top of that I tweaked the hitspot for the bigger bug to scale along with it's size so you don't have to be so close to attack it.

Running
A much requested feature for PTD2 has been the running shoes, so this week I will be adding them in. What I'm thinking now is that you will get them early on in the game, so you will have to go back to Cherrygrove City and talk to somebody to get them. But new players will get them right away after the zapdos fight. You will be able to toggle them on the pokepad menu.

Fishing
Not as highly requested but requested nonetheless is fishing. This week you will be able to get your old rod for just trying one of the fisherman's battles. Then to get the Good Rod you will have to beat all three of the fisherman battles. If you already beat them you won't have to do so again since I'm already keeping track of it. Once you have a rod you just step infront of a water source and interact with it (press spacebar).

PTD1 to PTD2 Transfers - The gang is all here!
This week I will be adding all the Generation 1 pokemon that you can already capture in PTD2 to the transfer. Specifically Jigglypuff, Wigglypuff, Zubat, Golbat, Bellsprout, Weepinbell, Victreebel, Geodude, Graveler, Golem, Gastly, Haunter, Genger, and Onix. On top of that any new pokemon added from Gen 1 will automatically get added to the PTD1 transfers. Since we are adding fishing this week. That means Poliwag, Poliwhirl, Poliwrath, Krabby, Kingler, Staryu, and Starmie.

Mystery Gift
It looks like Electric is going to win this week so we will get an Electric Mystery Gift and Giveaway. Make your voice heard in the poll above the blog.Cosmoids - Three strikes and you're out!
Last week we added the win/lose screen. Winning is pretty straight forward. Defeat all the enemies. But losing is incomplete. Right now you will only lose if your tower faints, but in reality if you let too many bugs passing by then you will lose. The lucky number will be 3 for this first level. Another thing I want to add this week is a proper fainting animation for units in the game. In PTD1 and PTD2 when something faints it simply disappears. For Cosmoids I want a small animation to play when something faints before it disappears. Just small little touches that help make the game more complete.

Weekly ProgressCosmoids Released!

Lose when you let 3 bugs pass (the giant bug counts as 3) (100%)

UI Graphic to show how many you have left to pass (100%)

Fainting animation for units (100%)

Add Revised Grass Graphics (100%)

PTD2 v1.41.1 Released!

Mystery Gift (100%)

Held Item Bug Fixed (100%)

PTD2 v1.41 Released!

PTD1 to PTD2 Transfer (100%)

Running Shoes (100%) - To get the shoes talk to an old man in Cherrygrove City after defeating Zapdos.

Fishing (100%) - To get a the old fishing rod you must beat the Fisherman at Route 32. To get the Good Rod you must beat his Tentacool, Qwilfish, and Magikarp. To fish you use the spacebar or Z when close to a water source.

Fixed a bug with the Pokemon Center showing a broken image for genderless pokemon (100%)

Test New Pokemon, attacks and abilities (100%)

New Pokemon (100%)

Graphics (100%)

New Attacks (100%)

Rain Dance (100%)

Submission (100%)

Vice Grip (100%)

Guillotine (100%)

Wide Guard (100%)

Camouflage (100%)

Trick (100%)

New Abilities (100%)

Illuminate (100%)

Analytic (100%)

Minus (100%)

Stats (100%)

Evolutions (100%)

Add to Trading Center (100%)

Add to Breeding Center (100%)

Remove Buneary Hunt (100%)

Make Zai's Berry battle have less waves (100%)

Made Zai's Berry battle have some dialog after the fight is over (100%)

That's all I have for you guys this week. I will be getting the part for my new computer this week so hopefully I can set it up and start streaming next week. As always let me know what you think!